Ostalgie is a Moronic Sentiment

Berlin’s mayor said on Saturday he was appalled that some Germans were nostalgic for the Berlin Wall and supported a newly fashionable leftist view that there were legitimate reasons for building it in 1961.

At a somber ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s construction, Mayor Klaus Wowereit, Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Christian Wulff paid tribute to the 136 people killed trying to get over the Wall to West Berlin.

Wowereit said the Wall, toppled in 1989, should serve as a reminder of freedom and democracy around the world. Church bells peeled while trains and traffic came to a standstill at noon across Berlin for a moment of silence for the victims.

“We don’t have any tolerance for those who nostalgically distort the history of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s division,” Wowereit said at the ceremony in front of a small section of the Wall recently rebuilt for posterity.

“The Wall was part of a dictatorship,” he said. “And it’s alarming that even today some people argue there were good reasons to build the Wall. No! There’s no legitimate reason nor justification for violating human rights and for killings.”

Of course, it is nothing short of amazing that this actually has to be debated.

As I have heard it described in the past, the largest bloc of people in Germany that wish the Berlin Wall were still up are not former East Germans with a wistful nostalgia about their Soviet overlords of decades past, but West Germans who consider the “Ossies” to be a poorly-educated, lazy, welfare-dependent underclass whom they’d rather not have to subsidize with their tax dollars.

In other words, the most damaging legacy of Communism in Europe may not be the Stockholm Syndrome-esque longings of its former subjects, but the destruction, both in human capital and in the human spirit, that dependence on an all-consuming Leviathan creates.